Chill (36 page)

Mirth was as sharp, but whatever will it cradled was not the will of a scalpel. Tristen would have to find its targets on his own.

Or maybe not.

“Gavin,” he said, as the basilisk collapsed itself from a net to a cord, binding Mallory to Chelsea for now. “Or Samael. Which one of you knows the anatomy of that thing over there?”

“Key,” Samael said, leaving Tristen to roll his eyes in exasperation. But he recited it again and felt the angel
stretch through the colony contact like a man popping his spine.

“Schematic,” Samael said, and the pattern of the Leviathan’s body lit up Tristen’s heads-up display.

“Great. Where’s it keep its brain?”

“That,” Samael said, “would appear to be the problem.”

   When Perceval opened her eyes again, it was five hundred years before. She stood under olive trees, on a lawn mown plush as velvet, and a woman draped in white robes and swagged with chains was being led before her.

Perceval smiled inside, but she would not let her lips curve. No one must see her mirth at an execution—no one except the executed, who would know it without being shown.

The woman knelt, her straight brown hair slipping apart to bare her nape as her head was lowered. A man came up behind her.
Benedick
, a naked unblade in his hand.

“Last words?” Perceval said to her daughter. As if in a dream, she knew what she would see—

No. Not Perceval. Perceval had never stood on this condensation-damp grass and watched her child be led out to slaughter.

Cynric lifted her chin for the last time. “May you have what peace you earn, Father.”

Alasdair who had been Perceval would not let the pressure of Cynric’s gaze force her back. She hooked a hand, and Benedick stepped up alongside her. He closed his eyes and opened them again when he lifted the unblade. Of course. Benedick would not spare himself the sight; he would rather make the blow true.

How perfectly like him. Alasdair who had been Perceval had raised him well.

Cynric rested her forehead upon the ground. Benedict passed the blade through her neck without seeming to exert any force at all. Blood fountained, and Alasdair who had been Perceval was splashed, because he would not step back from that either.

No
, Perceval said to Alasdair, who stretched inside her, wrestling for the memories first Ariane and now Perceval had eaten. Wrestling for control.
This is not me. This is not something I would have chosen
.

That was not my father, not really. That was somebody he was before. That was not my father, and this is not me
.

Cynric’s blood tasted like the sea. Perceval only realized when she licked her lips what she was savoring, and that she had never, in her own self, tasted of the sea.

The taste of it brought her home again, but it could not put her in control.

   Nova fought, and in this field of combat Perceval could do nothing but observe. Alienated from her own body, which slumped in the Captain’s chair all but untenanted, Perceval watched the angel’s drive and dance, the way Nova warded her resources and protected herself like a fighter born. But it was secondhand, too fast and too sharp for even Exalt reflexes to follow. This was a war of angels, limited only by the speed of light, in which mere augmented flesh and mind could not compete.

Still, Perceval’s focus lay with Nova: elsewhere, externalized. Into the silence of that concentration, unbidden, Perceval’s brain offered the thought:
The last Captain is the one who put us here. On purpose
.

This was planned
.

Unfair. Perceval didn’t know it was the Captain who made that decision. And she was not ready to dive back into her morass of clinging memories to see if she could find out. Had he known what the astrogators knew, that
there was no destination? That the whole world was just a blind hand groping in the dark?

She didn’t know it
hadn’t
been the Captain, either. And it
had
been he who authorized Cynric’s brutalization of the Leviathan.

Just like a Conn
, she thought.
Eating everything in sight
.

But she was a Conn. She was a Conn who had consumed Conns, who had eaten the remains of Commodores and Captains before her. Before it was inhabited by others, Perceval Conn had known her own mind. And that thought … did not feel like hers.

Nor did it feel like it came from any of the clamoring presences with her—Ariane, Alasdair, Gerald, and behind them the elder ancestors whose memories were not preserved in the colony. Felix, Sarah, Emmanuel Conn: Conns back to when the family had held another name, when human life was brief and frail, and human memory subject to the shifts and winds of neurochemistry. How subjective the world must have been, then, when no one could remember the same events, and nobody
would
remember them for long.

It was not Ariane’s thought. It was not Alasdair’s or—Perceval would guess, strictly on the basis of history—Gerald’s. But she thought she knew that tone, the arch sarcasm, the lilting intelligence. She could almost hear the voice in her ear, a real voice—

Far to ship-south, Nova whirled and twisted, warred against the Leviathan. She had long since abandoned all semblance of an avatar and now reserved her energy for things more important than appearances. Perceval could just about image her fight, pull it up from the microscopic scale. Nova was a hive of bees beset by a swarm of wasps, and the wasps were driving her back, pushing her from her boundaries, and disassembling the world as they forced its angel to withdraw.

Just like a Conn. Eating everything in sight
.

A voice Perceval knew. Oh, no.
Rien
.

She realized she’d said the name out loud only when she heard it in her own voice. She choked it back, though her lips shaped it a second time, disoriented and startled to find herself in her body, bound to the slow, helpless meat that would not let her save her ship, her angel, or her love.

Nova
, she thought, then silenced that as well. The angel did not need her distractions.

She needed her
help
. And Perceval had to figure out how to get it to her. Perceval stood, suddenly, knees wobbly. Blood stung in her feet and calves, circulation returning. She’d been still too long. It felt good to stretch into her neglected meat—good, and painful.

“Samael,” she said aloud to the still air of the bridge. “Make current your archives, angel. Back yourself up and make ready for combat. It is time for you to become useful.”

   Gavin made a bower of his wings, and folded the humans within, the angel without. They fell together, a dagger plunged across the bosom of the Enemy, aimed straight for the unraveling cage beyond. Tristen moved forward in his embrace, foremost of the incarnate intelligences he protected, suspended like a figurehead at the expanded basilisk’s prow. Gavin felt the prickle of Mirth’s presence, the blade naked and aware in Tristen’s gauntlet, and drew himself gently further from its slicing edge.

Not an unblade, no, but sufficient to the day.

The other humans huddled in silence within Gavin—Mallory bloodless and chill inside unfamiliar armor; Chelsea vibrating with excitement and youth; Benedick still and calm, collected within himself like a tree. Ahead, Samael broke trail, making of himself a thin
wedge ablating in rainbow tatters of light as the Leviathan’s forces wore away at his boundaries. Gavin gave the angel what he could—resources, cycles, material—but he was a small torch, and he didn’t have much to spare.

“Weary,” Benedick said, inside his armor, as if he had read Gavin’s thoughts. “We are weary. It’s the nature of war.”

“The war’s only begun,” Chelsea said.

“This war is as old as I am, child. This is just an installment.” Tristen sounded not scornful, but exhausted. “You’ll be tired of it soon.”

“Brace for impact,” Gavin said. “I can only do this once.”

He opened his wings, releasing the humans to their trajectory. Chelsea, Benedick, and Mallory initiated burns, curving in flanking arcs, while Tristen huddled small, bent into himself, silent and still and undeviating from the course Gavin had set.

Steeling himself against the energy drain, Gavin opened and focused his eyes.

   The savage light of the basilisk’s gaze sliced through the disintegrating cage surrounding Leviathan, struck the beast’s mottled hide, and left a cloud of dust and vaporized stone to sublimate on the empty breath of the Enemy. Tristen plunged through it, an abrasive hiss caressing the skin of his armor, the roughness transmitted as a prickling scrape. He resisted the urge to block his face with his arm to protect it—the armor was perfectly capable of keeping him safe, but all those animal reflexes didn’t know any better—and instead extended both hands before him, left fist clenched on Mirth’s hilt and right palm bracing the pommel. He made himself a blade, a living spear, a mass driven behind an infinitely fine point.

Around him, colonies sparked and glittered, his allies and family risking themselves to shape a distraction. Tristen allowed them only the peripheries of his attention. He knew where he was aiming, and his aim must be perfectly true. Something shattered, spinning, on his left. He feared it was armor; he feared more it was flesh.

He did not glance aside.

One thousand meters. Seven fifty. Five hundred. Trajectory confirmed, Tristen commenced his burn.

   Benedick had never expected to find himself defending an angel. But here he was, fighting at Samael’s side—fighting as Samael’s vanguard!—when Samael was far more adapted to this particular conflict than Benedick himself. The angel had to stay safe a little longer, though, and so he huddled inside Mallory, and Benedick defended two intelligences in one form. As Benedick groped through the swirling clouds of dust and nanotech, he had no difficulty losing himself in the rhythm and savagery of conflict. It was his grace and shame, he thought, that he could always find peace and clarity in the midst of ruin.

“I see him!” Gavin said sharply, in Benedick’s ear and for Samael’s hearing. Benedick held his concentration, turned, and parried the foray of a voracious colony with an arm of his own symbiote. It tore at him, but Benedick reinforced, surrounded, and a moment later Chelsea was there to back him up, her colony a formless destroying presence amid the raging, invisible skirmishes that surrounded them.

Further back, a twist of energy glittered, elusive in the light-wreathed textures of the nebula. Driving for them, identifiable by the taste of its energy signature as the wreck of an angel. Also, it was careful to stay well back from the front where Nova and the alien colonies battled, as marked by sparks and dazzling scars. Benedick
understood that it didn’t dare touch an angel who could relay direct instructions from the Captain.

But it could come and fight them—or so it was meant to think.

“Asrafil,” Mallory said. As the angel closed the distance, the necromancer’s armor began to vomit forth Samael, in the form of ropes of savage light.

   Gavin threw himself into the fray, linked with Samael’s colony, driving as much of himself into the battered angel as he dared.
I am behind you, Angel. Take what you will. Drive through
.

Samael’s acceptance flowed back down the connection, his determination and the flare of outrage as Asrafil spotted him and began to withdraw.
Spurn your Captain, construct?

But challenged, Asrafil only fled faster. For a moment, Gavin pitied him—wouldn’t everyone prefer freedom of choice?—but then something rose up in him, a long-concealed subroutine of betrayal, and he leapt forward into Samael, through him, pushing forward though hostile colonies frayed his edges and gnawed his wings to electronic marrow.

It didn’t hurt, not as Gavin understood and half remembered human hurting. But it felt strange, and his reflex was to withdraw, defend himself, pull close. Instead he made himself the head of an arrow, with Samael the shaft behind.

He’ll take us apart
, Gavin said, just to hear Samael’s mocking laugh. Within him, he felt something ticking. Sizzling. As if the touch of Samael’s colony under these conditions of war had activated a long-quiescent program, and now they were conjoined—partnered—in ways Gavin had never anticipated.

Then he’ll get what he deserves
, the angel answered. Gavin felt Samael’s long-archived memories flaring
bright. A plan, something held in abeyance and secret, seared through their conjoined identity.

Together, they gathered themselves and plunged into Asrafil’s sphere of control. Asrafil fled, drawing up his skirts, but he could not run fast nor far enough. They burned into him, broke through his wards, and … … detonated.

Asrafil screamed as the virus downloaded into his core.

   Leviathan was hot at his heart, a simmering heat from which Tristen’s armor offered only partial protection. The heat was an aid as much as a torment, though, for Tristen let his armor boots adhere to stone, and it gave him the leverage to hew at Leviathan’s core as if he hacked with an ax. Chunks of stone shining with a blue foxlight sprayed out of the hole he chopped, came apart into swirls of matter as the battling colonies appropriated and consumed them.

Through those same soles of his boots, Tristen heard Leviathan screaming. And something else, like a shard of something deadly and foreign lodged in the flesh of the beast. He could feel Arianrhod in there, feel how Leviathan had surrounded and subsumed her. And more, he felt her moving now, coming to the surface, sent for him full of the alien poison that, in altered form, touched his blood as well.

He raised Mirth once more, and the rock before him splintered out, spinning away in cascades and shards, scattering off the faceplate of his helm and chipping the reflective surface of his armor. A swath of ebony cut free of the Leviathan’s hide—an unblade truncated but still painfully familiar—and a woman stood free behind it, dragging herself up in the hole he had made. Someone caught his wrist in a grip harder than the stone he swung against.

—Grandfather
,—Arianrhod said.—
Enough. I speak for the beast.—